Wesley D. Stoner

Early Hunter-Gatherer Pottery along the Atlantic Coast of the Southeastern United States: A Ceramic Compositional Study

ABSTRACT Excavations at the Sapelo Island Shell Ring complex in Georgia produced a voluminous assemblage of St. Simons pottery and a small amount of pottery that appears to be of the Thoms Creek type. Known mainly from South Carolina, Thoms Creek ceramics have not been found this far south along the Georgia Coast (Williams and Thompson 1999:125–126). In this study, we investigate whether the ceramics found at Sapelo are more closely related to South Carolina wares or the local St. Simons type. To address this question, we used petrographic point counting and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) characterization techniques on a sample of sherds from both South Carolina and Georgia sites. This pilot study addresses the viability of these techniques for the sourcing of Late Archaic (4200–3000 BP) ceramics and the nature of hunter-gatherer cultural interaction on the southeastern coast of the United States.

Merging the social and the material: Life histories of ancient mementos from Central Mexico

This article proposes a way to bridge the chasm dividing archaeological studies of material properties and materials analyses from those of materiality, i.e. the mutually constitutive relationships between people and objects. This approach is demonstrated through the reconstruction of the life histories of curated figurines from Xaltocan, Mexico. Critical to this inquiry is an understanding of the material properties of the figurines — including form, style, and fragmentation — as well as materials analysis, specifically neutron activation analysis, which offers evidence of their places of origin. Using a life history approach provides insight into the production of Xaltocan as a place and its residents as people enchained or linked to ancient Teotihuacan, through the movement of these figurines through space and time. Furthermore, it demonstrates that these figurines, often ignored as accidents of site formation processes, were actually a crucial form of material culture through which residents constructed relationships with the past.

The Archaeology of Disjuncture: Classic Period Disruption and Cultural Divergence in the Tuxtla Mountains of Mexico

Reconstructing human interaction systems has been a major objective of archaeological research, but we have typically examined the topic in a conceptually limited manner. Most studies have—intentionally or unintentionally—focused on how trade, communication, conquest, and migration foster cultural similarities over long distances. It has largely been a positivistic endeavor that exclusively features groups linked through a single network but glosses over how alternative networks intersect with the former through common nodes. Models of long-distance interaction have largely ignored variation in how external influences are negotiated across space within the receiving region. We adapt Arjun Appadurai’s concept of disjuncture to conceptualize how human groups negotiate cultural messages transmitted through multiscalar interaction networks. Disjuncture fundamentally refers to the decoupling of different facets of culture, economy, and politics where human interactions follow variable trajectories through space. The variability with which human groups reconcile foreign cultural information within local social networks leads to cultural diversity across space in the receiving region. We use the concept to detail the variability with which Teotihuacan symbols, ideology, and economic influences were adopted across the Tuxtlas region of southern Veracruz, Mexico.

But Robert, Where Did the Pots Go? Ceramic Exchange and the Economy of Ancient Matacapan

Among Robert Santleys major contributions to Mesoamerican archaeology was the modeling of ancient economic systems. In particular, Santley proposed that the economies of Teotihuacans dependents were organized as dendritic central-place systems geared toward the bulking and export of goods and materials. Ceramic production and exchange figured prominently in Santleys dendritic model for the economy of Matacapan and the Tuxtla Mountains. In this paper we assess Santleys model in light of recent data on ceramic production and exchange in the Tuxtlas region. The result is a more informed view of political economy that does not easily fit any one central-place model.